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From Decremental to Incremental Safety Culture

In March 2025, Erik Hollnagel published a note on one of the most discussed yet least actionable concepts in safety: safety culture. The argument is straightforward: changing from a decremental safety culture ( obsessed with reducing failures and incidents) to an incremental culture (building the ability to succeed) is easy to talk about and hard to do.

The alternative to safety-culture maturity models is resilience — not as a material quality an organisation possesses, but as something it does. Resilient performance means functioning as required under both expected and unexpected conditions. This can be specified through four systemic potentials: the potential to respond, monitor, learn, and anticipate.

An incremental safety culture develops these four potentials together, not in isolation. The approach provides the three kinds of knowledge organisations actually need: knowing what to do, knowing how to do it, and knowing why it works. Safety-culture journeys, by contrast, offer attractive narratives with little practical value.

Source: A note on changing from a decremental safety culture to an incremental safety culture (PDF) · Related: Safety-I and Safety-II